A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge Read Free Book Online Page A

moment clutching at
it and bleeding. The moment you rise to favour, you gain a hundred unseen and envious enemies.
    ‘I was stung too often. No favour was worth it. I decided to pull myself out of the web, and buried myself in these tunnels so that I could not find myself playing the Court games even by
accident. Leaving the Court is no easy matter, for one finds oneself entangled – debts, threats, secrets shared, people who know your weaknesses and people whose weaknesses you know. When I
left, many whispered that this was just another move in a more complicated game, one that required me to be out of sight. There were four assassination attempts against me in the first
month.’
    The many locks, the precautions taken for every visitor . . . all of these began to make more sense.
    ‘Eventually they left me alone,’ continued the cheesemaker, ‘but only because, year in and year out, I took every care to be completely neutral. No games, no alliances, no
biases. I used the same rules for everybody. No exceptions.’
    ‘Oh . . .’ Neverfell hugged her knees as clarity dawned. ‘So that’s why you didn’t want to give Madame Appeline the Sturton when she asked for it? Because that
would be making an exception?’
    ‘Yes,’ Grandible muttered hollowly. ‘And now everybody will think that I have done so knowingly. At the grand banquet the Sturton will make its debut, and Madame
Appeline’s client will already have a Face tailor-made to respond to it. It will be obvious that it could not have been prepared without prior knowledge of the cheese. Everybody will see the
Face and know .’
    ‘What . . . what can I do? Can I make it better?’
    ‘No.’
    There it was. Neverfell felt her stomach turn over. For the hundredth time one of her wild gestures had knocked something over and broken it beyond mending. This time, however, she knew that she
had broken something far larger, something that could not be replaced. Her soul burned with self-hate, and she wished that she could break herself into a thousand pieces like a china pot. She
buried her nose between her knees and snuffled.
    ‘No,’ her master repeated. ‘There is nothing we can do. I shall send a man to try to retrieve the delivery, but I think it is too late.’
    ‘But . . . you could tell everybody it was my fault, and that you did nothing wrong! I could tell them what happened! Or maybe you could send me to talk to Madame Appeline! I could
explain, and ask her to give us back the Stackfalter Sturton—’
    ‘NO!’ For the first time Grandible sounded truly and ferociously angry. Neverfell leaped to her feet and fled.
    It was all very well being told that she could do nothing to make things better. Neverfell did not have the kind of mind that could take that quietly. She did not have the kind
of mind that could be quiet at all.
    In many respects, poor Neverfell’s overactive mind had coped with her lonely and cloistered life in the only way it could. It had gone a little mad to avoid going wholly mad. To break up
the dreary repetition of the day it had learned to skip unpredictably, to invent and half-believe, to shuffle thoughts until they were surprising and unrecognizable.
    Small wonder that when she did find somebody to talk with they barely understood her. She was like a playing piece making ‘knight moves’ when everybody else was obeying draughts
rules. Half the time her mind was visiting squares where nobody else ever landed and, even when people understood the position her mind had reached, they could never work out how she had got
there.
    At the moment, her mind was throwing up ideas and thoughts the way a fountain throws up water drops, most of them foolish on second glance, losing their glitter as they fell.
    We can give Stackfalter Sturton samples to everybody! Everybody in the entire Court! Then it’ll be fair!
    We can swap the big banquet Sturton for another giant cheese that looks exactly the same but tastes a bit